Irish children are overweight ‘because they are driven everywhere’ – Green deputy leader
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/politics/irish-children-are-overweight-because-they-are-driven-everywhere-green-deputy-leader/a859274535.html
Posted by norodaisy
50 Comments
In before the angry culchies
🍿
Yeah, that’s not the reason.
Not sure if I should be insensitive and point out something obvious
I live 2.5 km outside a provincial town.
Trying to walk anywhere on rural roads is a death wish.
Can’t outrun a bad diet
How thick does one have to be to become a politician?
And so say all of us. Back in my day we walked 5 mile to school and back. We’d get home and put the dinner on ourselves. Did us the world of good.
More sedentary lives does increase obesity. But cars are just one part of that. And activity is just one of the factors itself. Diet has a role to play too. Crap food is cheaper and faster.
Utter fucking bollocks.
The northern distributor road in Limerick would have made transport between Limerick and Clare direct and quick and up space for buses and bikes. The Green Party decided to ditch it. They seem to have different priorities in Dublin versus the country.
Can’t wait to see the back of these pricks after the next election.
My niece won’t walk to her friends house. She’ll always ask for a lift. The house is less than 5 minutes away.
I think another factor is that schools only do 1 or 2 pe classes a week here and a lot of primary schools don’t have afterschool sports available. If they got the recommended hour of exercise every day in school, it would be a massive step.
Another issue I’ve noticed is that the new school lunches that schools have started to provide either have limited nutritional info or no nutritional info. A lot of the options sound like fast food garbage, although without a full breakdown, it’s hard to know if they are or not.
The government was also gonna bring in calorie counts in bars and restaurants but backtracked.
I’m all for more bike infrastructure and for tackling the rise of obesity, but it’s more complex than simply pointing at 1 solution. We need to bring in a wide range of changes to properly bring it down
Yep. Cars are also the reason for the rise in far right ideology, some Green probably.
Green party leadership shooting ruining all their rural votes once again
No, it’s primarily bad diet
You can’t outrun a bad diet you could walk 10k a day every day and it won’t make any difference if you have a bad diet
A party of gobshites completely out of touch with reality.
Green deputy leader feels inadequate; needs column inches
It’s the food. It’s quite obviously the food. Normal people know fuck all about calories and nutrition.
Parents of fat kids ain’t going to like that 🏃♀️
When I was a kid I used to eat 2L of ice cream after school and about 12 chocolate puddings on top of my dinner. When I had beans on toast I’d eat a full loaf of bread, buttered, and two cans of baked beans. My parents thought I had an eating disorder
However, I could run a sub-17km 5km and I weighed only 65kg at 18yo so I think it just outran my bad diet
I was also driven everywhere so I don’t think it’s that
It’s the amount of food, running 5km burns about the same calories as a doughnut….
Irish children are overweight because thier parents are overweight and don’t know about nutrition.
If you let your kid become fat when they are still developing they will struggle with thier weight for thier entire life, thier fat cells with literally multiple, it’s so much worse than it you let yourself get fat later on in life, you really have to put on a significant amount of fat to get to the point where your fat cells start to multiply.
Even if that’s the reason (it’s not), what does the government think about public transport options? How are those doing?
A former roommate (on the heavy side) was a die-hard for the gym supposedly. Yet the gym was a 10 minute walk away in my town.
He drove, shrugging off my pointing out the incongruity of his action.
Green Party spot on. If the kids are within about 1km, that is walkable.
Kids are eating shit and shitting on their phones and computers. Trying to turn to turn this into a green policy issue is wild.
Because they turned this country into suburban sinkholes
What even is this nonsense? Are we ever actually gonna take a step back and refuse this consent cycle of rage bait bullshit? This is nonsense. Who got held accountable for the cycle shed corruption? Remember when they bought a fucking printer for the dail and had to knock walls in a protected structure to make room for the fucking thing that no one even used? It’s a constant stream of utter bullshit that never gets resolved. When’s the children’s hospital opening? The most expensive building the world has ever seen. RTE get a bailout only months after the Tuberty scandal. When was the last time you even heard that cunts name? It feels so utterly fucking hopeless at times when as a country we should be primed for success
Despite umpteen approaches to our local county council, we are entirely unable to use the small country road in anything except a car, as it used by commuter skipping motorway traffic at speeds that’s are far too high, taking bends far too wide.
It doesn’t matter that the school is less than 3km away. It’s simply not safe to use the road.
They’re not wrong. Kids are waaaaaay less active than they used to be. Its clearly contributing to things like being overweight and bad postures.
Fat shaming kids now from the green dicks?
Yeah cause all the crap they eat has nothing to do with it.
Greens using any and every excuse to push their agenda without actually putting a plan in place to actually do anything.
Diet.
If your diet is shite, it doesn’t matter how much exercise you do. Some roads I wouldn’t walk on. Pure death wish!
I think it’s the type of food people eat nowadays. For example something I noticed maybe 10 years ago in a starbucks, all the young people that were coming into the shop. Almost all of them were ordering a fatty sugary hot drink, which was then topped with whipped cream or something? It was crazy it would sicken you to look at a drink like that. There’s probably as much calories in that as someone would eat in a meal.
Is this an issue? Yes. Is this a wild extrapolation and oversimplification? Also yes.
We do need better public transportation so that children and adults don’t need to be driven everywhere. Would this help combat obesity? Probably a bit. Would it have other health benefits? Certainly. Is it the root cause? Not remotely.
Some schools have sweet machines in them.
Maybe start there.
I remember reading that we also ate a lot in the 80s. Asking CHATGpt I get
> During the 1980s, the average daily per capita calorie intake in Ireland was approximately 3,200 kilocalories.
> Source:
> • Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Food Balance Sheets from the 1980s.
That’s not children but it is everybody, per capita.
Nowadays it says
> The average daily calorie intake per person is approximately 3,600 kilocalories (kcal).
> Comparison with the 1980s:
> • 1980s: ~3,200 kcal/person/day
> • Now: ~3,600 kcal/person/day
Crazy figures for either of them. That said the 80s were also high but the population was thinner, so general exercise probably did matter.
Well yes. School traffic is a cancer. Bring back school buses. And get them to walk to school – even better.
This is new nonsense! I like this argument, rare to see such new nonsense in Iriag politics!
She’s not far off the mark
They are fat because they eat too much. It’s not complicated. Why are so many people trying to avoid the obvious.
Wow she said what? As a member of the government surely she should come up with suggestions to get kids active and not shame children.
As other people have said here there are different challenges between rural, town and city living.
And it’s absolutely nothing to do with the sugar laden chemical shite they consume morning noon and night.
The split is beginning
Nothing to do with diet, advertising etc etc? I emailed her before about green grants, the woman could not follow logic in the slightest.
I walk everywhere. I always have it’s a about 5km round-trip to work, daily for the last 10 years, not including the walking I do in work and it’s a semi physical job.
I’m a fat fuck. It has nothing to do with my daily exercise. It has everything to do with the shit I shove in my gob!
If only the Greens could speak with the minister for transport to implement changes to make roads safer to walk on.
Not true -it’s because they aren’t going outside or playing outside. They are sitting indoors on phones, iPads, video games, etc etc etc. It’s lazy parenting.
Sugar is the problem.
Sure, but good luck trying to walk or cycle anywhere useful safely or in a reasonable time especially if you might have hours of homework and study, clubs, etc to manage, and double especially if you’re somewhere rural. There’s not the infrastructure for anything but driving.
And the food quality is gone to shit